Richards-Communicative-Language pdf

The Goals of Language Teaching

Communicative language teaching sets as its goal the teaching of communica-

tive competence.

 What does this term mean? Perhaps we can clarify this term by 

first  comparing  it  with  the  concept  of  grammatical  competence.  Grammatical 

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Communicative Language Teaching Today  3

competence refers to the knowledge we have of a language that accounts for 

our  ability  to  produce  sentences  in  a  language.  It  refers  to  knowledge  of  the 

building blocks of sentences (e.g., parts of speech, tenses, phrases, clauses, sen-

tence patterns) and how sentences are formed. Grammatical competence is the 

focus of many grammar practice books, which typically present a rule of gram-

mar on one page, and provide exercises to practice using the rule on the other 

page.  The  unit  of  analysis  and  practice  is  typically  the  sentence.  While  gram-

matical competence is an important dimension of language learning, it is clearly 

not all that is involved in learning a language since one can master the rules of 

sentence formation in a language and still not be very successful at being able to 

use the language for meaningful communication. It is the latter capacity which 

is understood by the term communicative competence.

Communicative  competence  includes  the  following  aspects  of  lan-

guage knowledge:



  Knowing how to use language for a range of different purposes 

and functions



  Knowing how to vary our use of language according to the setting 

and the participants (e.g., knowing when to use formal and 

informal speech or when to use language appropriately for written 

as opposed to spoken communication)



  Knowing how to produce and understand different types of texts 

(e.g., narratives, reports, interviews, conversations)



  Knowing how to maintain communication despite having 

limitations in one’s language knowledge (e.g., through using 

different kinds of communication strategies)

Task 2

Consider the following sentences that are all requests for 

someone to open a door. Imagine that the context is normal 

communication between two friends. Check if you think 

they conform to the rules of grammatical competence (GC), 

communicative competence (CC), or both.